The legal system has long taken a “no harm, no foul” approach to certain legal disputes: If you haven’t actually been injured by the other party’s actions, you’ll have a hard time convincing the court that your lawsuit shouldn’t be thrown out. But the internet, where incorrect information can be disseminated globally within seconds (and may never truly be erased), is causing courts to reconsider the question: When can you sue a company for an intangible harm? [More]
spokeo
Why You Should Care About This Lawsuit Against A Data Company You’ve Probably Never Heard Of
By 8.15.17
Supreme Court To Decide If You Can Sue When Data Aggregators Are Wrong
By 4.27.15
There’s a true 21st-century case a-brewing at the Supreme Court, one of those unsexy legal questions with enormous potential repercussions. At heart of the matter is personal data. There’s an insane amount of it out there, on each and every one of us, and it’s all for trade, barter, and sale. But that doesn’t mean it’s all correct or true. So if some website or service goes around saying you’re someone you’re not, do you have the right to sue?
[More]
Spokeo Hit With $800,000 Settlement On Allegations Of Haphazardly Marketing Personal Info To Employers
By 6.12.12
It’s one thing for your employer or potential employer to do a Google search on you, or scour through your public Facebook profile. It’s another for a company to market this information to employers and human resources departments for the express purpose of background screening. Doing so haphazardly could result in a violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act. [More]
Identifight Tells You What Sites Your Email Address Is Publicly Linked To
By 3.31.08
Matthew wrote in to complain about a new website called Spokeo, which sounds like a stalker’s dream: it sucks up all the entries in your address book, then returns a Big Brothery smorgasbord of all the publicly accessible accounts and services linked to each email address, along with updates any time something happens. It might surprise you to see just how easy it is for someone to assemble a picture of your Internet footprint with only an email address.
Don’t like the sound of that? Luckily for you, someone has already been inspired to follow Spokeo’s model and create a tool—Identifight—that lets you track your own email address to see what shows up, so you can patch up privacy leaks.
